shashi tharoor book on british colonialism

And on top of that, that belief is sort of reinforced by these misty-eyed television dramas like “Indian Summers” and even the “Jewel in the Crown”, which as books were actually much more balanced and aware of Indian points of view. So the British to a large extent are unaware there is anything to apologize for. They've managed to portray to themselves and, to some degree to the world, certainly to the western world, the British Empire as some sort of benign exercise in altruism, which is far from being the truth … The fact is that it was neither benign nor altruistic it was deeply rapacious, and deeply self-centered and self-benefiting. Q: Why have successive British governments refused to apologize or even properly acknowledge the kind of damage that that they caused to India, its economy and its people?Ī: I think partly it’s because the British were successful, too successful at the self-justifying mythologizing that has taken place since the 19th century of their mission.

I had a number of details like this … So in some cases my own knowledge was deepened and widened by reading a lot more contemporary material than I was able to do in undergraduate history before the internet was invented and you couldn’t go into so much scholarship and documents from the 18th-19th centuries that are now easily accessible to all of us on the internet. Now this was something which had been reported by a British journalist in 1908 but I hadn't read it. For example, reading about the episode when the British tried to partition Bengal in 1905 and the Nawab of Dhaka who was a Muslim leader from eastern Bengal said this was beastly and opposed it, whereupon the British slipped him a 100,000 pounds and he changed his tune. I was always very aware of the very conscious efforts of the British on fomenting separation between Hindus and Muslims, but some of the details were fascinating. For example, the whole section on “Divide et Impera - “Divide and Rule”, which was a conscious British policy after 1857-58.

Q: Was there any new information or anecdote or data that you came across and found interesting or startling enough to include in the book?Ī: I found everything interesting, but was there anything that surprised or startled me? I think a couple of things.

Shashi tharoor book on british colonialism